2015 Muriel Awards: Best Editing

Remember when I said there were lots of close races this year? Well, this wasn’t one of them. In fact, the winner - which you can probably guess already - won by the second-largest margin of victory in Muriels history, garnering 309% as many points as its nearest competition (the all-time champ remains Christopher “It’s a BINGO!” Waltz for Inglourious Basterds, who got 357% of the points earned by that year’s #2, future Doctor #12 Peter Capaldi). But even if you’re not a fan of this movie, I’m sure you can still appreciate what an impressive piece of editing it is, which today’s writer eloquently points out for us. And so…

Third place:

Sicario (editor Joe Walker) [98 points / 16 votes]

Second place:

Creed (editors Michael P. Shawver and Claudia Costello) [104 points / 18 votes]

And the Muriel goes (decisively) to…

Mad Max: Fury Road (editor Margaret Sixel) [322 points / 43 votes]

“From a data-driven cinemetric perspective, Mad Max: Fury Road impresses based on the pure quantity of its editing. 2700 individual shots, chiseled from 470 hours of footage down to 120 minutes (a ratio of minutes unused to minutes used of 235:1), with an average shot length of 2.1 seconds; Fury Road is easily one of the *most* edited films of 2015. But herculean tasks are not necessarily artistic achievements, and what Editor Margaret Sixel accomplished with Fury Road is unquestionably film art.

“In Film Art, Bordwell & Thompson’s essential text, a case study looks at how The Road Warrior manages to cross the 180° axis of action (a classical cinema no-no) while maintaining spatial clarity during the final action sequence. As if to one up its predecessor, Fury Road repeats this audacious technique early and often. The geography has been clearly established via a POV shot from the perspective of a dwarf peering through a telescope: the road creates a straight line from the Southern Citadel up to the Northern Gas Town, and Furiosa is seen driving the War Rig East (screen left) as she attempts an escape to the Green Place.

“With this simple compass firmly formed in the audience’s imagination, Sixel and director George Miller (her husband) are able to boldly experiment with spatial relations – so a technique that audiences weren’t expected to accept until the end of The Road Warrior, happens within the first 15 minutes of Fury Road. In addition to jump cuts, shot-reverse-shots on the axis, cross cutting, flash backs, and nearly every other type of transition in film history, Sixel makes a direct homage to the greatest single cut in cinema history: the glow of a road flare becomes the outline of Max buried in the desert sand; just as a match’s flame became the Sun in Lawrence of Arabia’s iconic match cut.

“Sixel is able to so fearlessly play with editing conventions, in part, because of Miller and Cinematographer John Seale’s careful planning. Knowing they wanted a propulsive, chaotic rhythm to the editing, but wanting to avoid the spatial obfuscation typical of action blockbusters, Seale was instructed to keep all action in the center of his camera (as Vashi Nedomansky beautifully explains here). This center framing ensured that whenever there was a cut, the audience would know where to look; and the geographic orientation ensured the audience would always know where the characters are. This attention to clarity within chaos allows us to truly witness Mad Max:Fury Road - eternal, shiny and chrome.” ~ Kevin Cecil

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